As it happens, I made one of those for the last Modern PTQ season, and wrote about it in The Very Model of a Major Modern Manabase. The worksheet is in Numbers format, and will break if you try to import it into Excel, unless things have changed since I last checked. You can download it from the linked article, which also includes a handy video tutorial on how to use the worksheet.

I’m thinking of making an updated Modern manabase worksheet using Excel this time. That has dual advantages (as I mentioned in the most recent In Development) – it’s usable by more readers and I don’t have to hand code the hypergeometric distribution.

If any of you have specific questions you’d like to see answered by a worksheet, let me know and I’ll see if I can tackle them.

This week’s In Development looks at the deck choices of top-performing PT players in terms of whether they picked (and how they did) with more or less popular decks. Luis noticed something else that’s baked into the data:

It’s true – all of Luis’s 24+ performances have come at the helm of full-on aggro decks.

That prompted this bit of bonus content looking at the deck types that top performers have piloted to victory. In no particular order, here are our nine players with their deck choices and success levels by category. The visualization is the same as in the article, with green (24+ points), yellow (15-23 points), and red (<15 points) and the intensity of each color reflecting the number of performances in that category.

Just as Gau plays mostly outliers, he also plays mostly aggro.

That red square of badness in combo for Estratti is almost entirely Valakut decks.

Crushing victories seem to be weighted toward Aggro and Combo, which isn’t necessarily surprising. Having a proactive, aggressive plans does mean that if your opponent stumbles, you often just win.

If you’d like to see one of the projects I’m working on in the land of science, check out the new Orphan Enzymes Project site.

The “fuel” that really makes modern DNA-based science work is the fact that we have a giant library of genes with their functions. That’s how we are able to sequence a new gene and make a pretty solid guess at what it does based on what other genes it looks like.

Some of the time.

The problem is that we don’t always find a similar gene in our library of known genes. As it happens, there’s still a whole lot of older research out there waiting to be put into that library. That’s what the Orphan Enzymes Project is all about.

So if that sounds interesting, check the site out for a basic outline of the project, with more to come later.

Brains…or failing that, plant food

As I mentioned in my post about a Jund list, I did try to build an update on Black/Red Zombies. However, the addition of Golgari to Standard puts an understandable pressure (or incentive) on playing green in any Zombies deck. The build below came together after some tinkering and it’s surprisingly effective and resilient.

The Scavenge ability on Slitherhead is quite powerful, as is the ability to profitably pitch a Gravecrawler or Slitherhead to Lotleth Troll.

Dreg Mangler’s haste is also pretty important, as it makes it risky to leave yourself naked against what might otherwise be a slower aggro deck without apparent reach.

With Farseek, all things are possible

My happiness at the return of the shocklands is only matched by my happiness at already owning a set of shocklands.

One of the extra-fun features of the new Standard is that Farseek is cleverly written to be able to search up nonbasics as long as they’re typed. This means that, as we saw back when Ravnica itself was in Standard, many decks will want to touch green to give them access to superlative mana fixing.

The Jund build below actually began life as inspiration in the middle of a frustrated effort to build an updated Black/Red Zombies list. It’s quite a bit of fun and gets good mileage out of both Dreadbore and Abrupt Decay.

In case you missed it, Jules Robins had a fun column recently showing off the best results from his “You Make the Planeswalker” contest. It’s a fun read, with a lot of creativity in terms of planeswalker abilities. My favorite was this planeswalkerized take on Glissa:

The second ability obviously synergizes quite well with an infect deck. It’s also cute, inasmuch as it’s effectively another +1 ability.

It’s the third ability that really caught my attention, as it puts your opponent on a strict clock in a way that almost no other planeswalker ultimate has done to date. A poison-generating emblem just hadn’t occurred to me, and it’s a cool idea.

It’s also pretty slow, of course, since you need to make infect bugs unmolested for four turns before you can activate the emblem – and then you need to hope they don’t kill you while the emblem counts up. In fact, if you’re curious about just how slow Glissa’s ultimate would be, you can check out this article I wrote about how quickly planeswalkers deploy.

Anyway, the planeswalker design article is a fun one, so check it out.

So here you go. Drawn from two Pro Tours, we have CawBlade, Faeries, and some of their opponents.

Pro Tour Paris 2011

This Pro Tour featured several CawBblade lists in the top 8, along with some fast aggro and one example of a control deck. Two things stood out to me here. First, Grixis is all utility cards and trumps, with nothing in between. Second, CawBlade is pretty trump-tastic compared with Delver. Of course, four of those trumps are Jace, who saw a banning relatively soon after.

Pro Tour Hollywood 2008

PT Hollywood had a lot of Faeries decks, but they didn’t really make it through to the top eight (except for Paulo, who did pretty well but get rolled by one of the nastiest “empty my hand” openings I’ve seen from an aggro deck in the quarterfinals). It also saw the debut of early Vivid Control in the form of Manuel Bucher’s Quick’n Toast, which had a solid day one performance before falling off into day two.

Notably, Elves hits its power cards very quickly. You can see how it could overwhelm Faeries, and how it sure would overwhelm Quick’n Toast.